Update on Other Side Projects

Ubuntu on a stick will be tested again on Monday when I can get access to other computers that might be able to boot it if it were to be a hardware conflict however until then I will not be able to report any progress on that project unfortunately.

I am also hoping to run live a distribution of Linux called back track 2. This distribution as I mentioned in an earlier post is a security related distribution. I do not, unlike the immediate assumptions some people may come to, want to hack into other peoples computers and make ad ware, viruses or any other malicious code, script or software. In fact I think people, and to some extent now companies, who write ad ware and viruses should be strung up but their privates and left for the vultures to pick at. I am simply interested in security related programs and system. I became interested some years back when I had to encrypt some text in Visual Basic 6 so it could be stored. I designed an algorithm to encrypt the code which I have only just found out closely models the one time pad. It went though many versions being re-written in C#, and J# to deal with files and not just text.

A couple of years back I spent some time uncovering security problems "hacks" if you will in the network at my school.

Mono and Fedora 7

Being a bit of a programmer means and having assignments that require me to submit code in C# mean that I have to have a viable and easy way to develop these applications. My software design teacher had once spoken to me about Mono which he referred to as .NET for Linux. On Windows I use either Visual Studio Codename Orcas or Visual C# Express Edition to develop applications for my own use and for projects for my online software design classes. The logical move for me was to download Mono, which I did. That in itself was a bit of a task but after using yum to download and install all the packages I could (I used the x86 Fedora 5 packages as they were the ones that were closest in match to my system) I went to load it. I found it placed nicely in the programming menu of the applications menu and loaded it up. It loaded ok and I tried my first "Hello World" program in Console C#. For a moment I was a little unsure as to weather it had actually worked or not but I found unlike on Windows where a console window is opened when a console application runs the output of the console app was down the bottem of the screen in the "output" panel. I though this was all very nice until I tried to read from the console.

Console.WriteLine(Console.ReadLine());

It did seem to let me enter in any response on the screen. If anyone knows how this is done or a way around it please leave a comment as it would be most appreciated.

My next problem arose from the Gtk 2.0 framework. While installing many of my Fedora 7 packages were more up to date than the ones in listed to be installed via yum and yum made it clear that there were conflicts between these packages so I just left it at that expecting things just to work with the newer packages I have. When I went and designed a Gtk 2.0 application and ran it, it would display two errors saying:

"The type or namespace name `Gtk' could not be found. Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?(CS0246)"

One error is for the using statement in the form events code and the other is for the using statement on the form designer code.

I went poking around in the references but couldn't see Gtk. I am at a little bit of a loss as to what to do here too. I suspect, knowing me, that I will find a fix for it soon, which I will post but it is a little bit annoying.

I have also installed and looked over Eclipse which will be useful when I do C++ coding which I might be taking up some more of sooner or latter. I seem to remember that packaged with Fedora Core 4 was Eclipse but with C# support (could have a faulty memory though). This version I have my hands on at the moment doesn't seem to support C# code.

Sorting out the nitty gritty with Fedora 7.

I have spent some time getting Fedora 7 working with all the bits and bobs that I need working. So far so good. After configuring yum with

"rpm -Uvh http://www.fedorafaq.org/yum"

(yum if you don't know is a package installer that runs from various repositories like "apt" and "apt-get" from Debian based systems such as Ubuntu - see http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/ ) I have been able to download and install mp3 decoders which work for Totem as per http://www.fedorafaq.org/#mp3.

I can read my NTFS filesystem now and access my Windows files but I haven't been able figure out how to mount it so it appears in "Computer". I think it has something to do with "/media/". If anyone knows please leave a comment as I would like to get that working.

I also need to figure out how to get mono installed so I can get on with programming. It would be nice to submit my next programming assignments knowing that the source has been completely written and compiled on Fedora.

Fedora 7 is Installed

I have finished installing Fedora (well actually I did quite some time ago but I have been playing around and havn't posted yet).

I like it. Everything is very responsive and everything is loaded almost instantly when I login which is good.

I can access my NTFS partition and I intend to do my assignments this weekend on Fedora. I have to say thing don't "just work" quite as much with Fedora but all the same I suppose it is making me understand Linux a bit better. I have to say I am picking it up pretty quickly though which is good from perspective.

I like it how it also show live thumbnails just like Vista (I suspect (know) Microsoft got the idea from Linux distros though).

My only real problem at the moment is getting mp3s to play everything else works fine which is good. I am however making good use of http://www.fedorafaq.org/ though. I have got each folder stayin in the same window when I open it now instead of spawning new windows.

Its done by going to the browse then edit -> preferences -> behavior and then checking always open in browser windows. This wasn't really where I would have expected it. I went looking is System -> Preferences but now I think about it its very logical and easy to access to preferences.

I have yet to get dual monitor which goes by the name "dual head" under System -> Administration -> Display but it says when I logout and log back in again it should work.

USB Ubuntu

Unfortunately I have not been able to access a computer today that can boot from a USB stick (except fro my own but as I have said it has an invalid compressed format error) so I have not been able to do further testing on other machines.

I did however notice that the rescue disk that I am using to install Fedora didn't using initrd.gz instead it used initrd.img on its own. initrd.gz is just a compressed version of initrd.gz that I am gathering is used to help it fit a a CD. I was thinking though that if I reconfigured the syslinux boot loader config file (syslinux.cfg) to load initrd.img and then extracted the image from the gz archive it might actually circumvent then need to decompress initrd.gz.

If you have any good ideas here please leave a comment as I would love to get it working on my computer.

Fedora 7 Install

I am currently installing Fedora 7 which was released on the 31st of May. I hope to have it completely installed by the end of this evening. I have opted to download the rescue disk and then install from HTTP which is much better I thin because to my understanding each package is checked as it is downloaded and if one package is corrupted then it will be re-downloaded where as if I get a corrupted ISO image then its a whole 700M I have to download again.

I would be downloading from my ISP's mirror but at the moment the server isn't responding so I have opted to download from redhat.download.fedoraproject.org.


I have also set up another test box in my room which is not connected to my network (at the moment) just to test out those micro distributions of Linux such as DSL.

I would also be interested in security related distributions of Linux such as PHLAK but unfortunately that project is no longer alive.
A link on the PHLAK site did however catch my eye and I would be interested in using a Live distribution of Linux called "Back Track 2". This is not so much because I want to hack other peoples computers but because I have had quite an interest in security related systems and would like to better understand how such systems work.

As it runs live it would also be another interesting distro of Linux to put on a flash drive.

Ubuntu

A few things have changed since I last posted. I have moved up in the world. I downloaded Ubuntu 7.04 and tried to install it to the USB drive. It worked but this time I get Err=2 instead of Err=1. I suspect now that this is hardware related. This would be extremely coincidental if it were to occur despite media checks, multiple ISO burns to CD and DVD and various install methods. My hardware testing on other computers wasn't that rigorous and I will re-install it and have one more go at running it at school of the USB. (Would be really really nice if it worked.)

While trying to get it to work I did try just using the Ubuntu installer and installing to the flash drive but just without a swap partition so as to improve the life of the usb. However that seems to decompress the packages that are otherwise compressed on the live version. It says that it needs at least 2gb to work. With 4Gb and 8Gb USB sticks on the market this is not beyond the realms of possibility and would alleviate the need for casper to make the live usb persistent (which is the technique used by the main tutorail I have been using at http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/02/12/usb-ubuntu-tutorial-for-linux-users/ )

With that all said and done I am waiting to find a good mirror to get my hands on Fedora 7 (released today). I have in the meantime installed Ubuntu and all is going well. I have to say that everything just works or is easily installed by "follow the prompts" installers. In fact I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy it was to get the Totem player to run mp3 files and open other public domain formats.

I was able to access my main hard drive which has Vista on it (NTFS) and get my music off it and start playing it. That was great. I was however unable to actually save or modify anything on the Vista partition though but I don't really care just as long as I can get my important files off with minimal effort. In fact it is quite good that it doesn't let me modify the NTFS partition because knowing me I would probably stuff it up.